


If Only It Were True

by JackieOKCorral



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Foggy the Friendly Coma Ghost, Happy Ending, M/M, Not Really Character Death, kink meme prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-27
Updated: 2018-02-27
Packaged: 2019-03-24 15:52:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13814454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JackieOKCorral/pseuds/JackieOKCorral
Summary: Matt's roommate never showed up on move-in day. But it turns out the universe has a way of remedying that situation.(Inspired by a kink meme prompt. Full details in author's note.)





	If Only It Were True

**Author's Note:**

> I've been looking for an excuse to fic-ify the Reese Witherspoon vehicle [Just Like Heaven](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_like_Heaven_\(film\)) for a while, and [this prompt](https://daredevilkink.dreamwidth.org/8773.html?thread=17564741#cmt17564741) seemed to fit it fairly decently? At least, I'd call this a partial fill.
> 
> Nobody's actually dead. I didn't research anything past the first 10 Google results of whatever topic required it. And I'm playing fast and loose with canon all over the place, especially the orphanage nonsense because there's no such thing in the US anymore, but I hope it hits the spirit of the prompt (no pun!) if not the letter of it. 
> 
> Tons of thanks to [mrstrentreznor](http://archiveofourown.org/users/mrstrentreznor/pseuds/mrstrentreznor) for looking it over for me (even though this isn't her fandom) and reassuring me that it didn't suck. :-D

Matt doesn’t have that much to unpack. So when he’s got the last of his seven outfits into the cheap presswood drawers (two of which he can already tell are going to be impossible to keep on their tracks), his Bible on his nightstand, his toiletries in their places in the bathroom, his two pairs of shoes under the bed (which exudes a funk consisting of about a decade’s worth of cheap soap, sweat, and sperm), and his sheets and comforter on the mattress, he sits on its edge, turning the prepaid phone his last set of foster parents gave him in his hands. (The dad lost his job and they had to move in with his parents, so back Matt went to the group home.) It’s not super-accessible, of course, just a year-old cheap flip phone, so he can’t text very easily, but he’s got a few numbers programmed into the speed dial. The first is his priest, the second is his old guardian ad litem _,_ whose heartbeat was actually sincere when she said she wanted to continue to help him out with anything he needed as an adult, and the third is someone he’s never met.

Well, not in person. They’ve talked, a few times via email and then on the phone twice after that. Matt doesn’t cherish any hope that he’ll actually be _friends_ with Foggy Nelson (or desire for things to work out that way), but his assigned roommate seems easy-going at least. It could be worse.

Except, Foggy said he would be in the building by ten, and that was nearly seven hours ago. Meeting him is sure to be awkward, because he’ll be with his parents, and they’ll ask about _Matt’s_ parents, and then they’ll have to have the talk about _that_ , plus there’s the blind revelation, and honestly Matt would really like to get the whole thing over with before dinner.

The RA knocks on his doorframe and announces, “Hey, Matt, it’s Erin. Have you heard from Franklin?”

Matt goes blank for a second before remembering that Foggy’s a nickname. “No, not since last week. He said he’d be here this morning, though.”

“Yeah, that’s weird. I guess I’m going to have to check with Housing, make sure nothing went wrong on their end.” She fidgets, a quick flush of warmth making her face flare. “You don’t need any help, or anything, right? Getting to the dining hall?”

In point of fact, he’s already figured out where most of the eateries on campus are based on smell alone. “It’s, ah, it’s better for me to find my own way. Can’t always count on someone being around to help so…”

Her face goes hotter. “Right. Okay. Well, if you hear from Franklin let me know, all right?”

Matt does try to call once, but it goes straight to voicemail. He hangs up before Foggy’s cheerful voice finishes reeling off the invitation to leave him a message.

***

Foggy never shows, and the next morning Erin catches Matt in the hall on his way to breakfast to let him know he’ll be getting a different roommate.

“Did you find out what happened?” he can’t help but ask.

“No, the lady at Housing was weird about it when I asked. She just said he was taking a leave of absence, which makes zero sense because he’s an incoming freshman. But no matter what, there’s a wait list for the dorms, so you’re not getting a room to yourself.”

Matt shrugs. “I never have before, either.” Well. Not since After.

“Cool. New guy’s name is Nate Smith, and he should be here tomorrow, just so you’re ready.”

Nate, it turns out, has a girlfriend named McKenna two floors down, and Matt can tell they’re going to make her roommate’s life hell from the moment he hears them coming up the stairs together with his luggage. Matt knows how to handle this sort of thing, though—he had plenty of experience with marking his territory before he moved out of the last group home.

The main strategy is to just never leave Nate and his girlfriend alone when they’re in his room, something the blindness helps with. It’s not a foolproof plan. There’s always the danger that they’ll decide his inability to see means they can fuck each other right in front of him (Matt has had some _bad experiences,_ okay). So Matt makes sure to be in his room every time he’s not in class. This early in the semester, he doesn’t need library access all that often, and he’s got to make sure Nate doesn’t feel too comfortable.

After the first couple of weeks, he’s pretty confident it’s working. McKenna’s roommate has retreated in horror, spending a lot of time with their floor’s RA begging for help, but at least Nate and McKenna aren’t flooding Matt's room with pheromones on a daily basis. The only drawback is that he sort of hasn’t really eaten a meal in a while. He’s grabbed snacks on his way to and from class, but that’s about it. It’s not the first time food’s taken a back seat to bigger priorities, and he’s sure it won’t be the last. _Mind over matter,_ he reminds himself as he curls himself around the aching in his stomach that he can’t ignore when campus gets quiet after midnight. Far away, so far he can barely catch it with the edges of his hearing’s range, a guy harangues his roommate about how humans need to eat regularly in order to survive. Never say God doesn’t have a sense of humor.

On the third Sunday after the start of the semester, he returns from Mass and smells rotisserie chicken from the stairs. His mouth starts watering pretty much immediately. By the time he unlocks his door, he’s practically drooling down his chin, and he’s ready to punch Nate for torturing him. Who brings food to their room and then just _leaves_ it like that? For that matter, who buys an entire rotisserie chicken and brings it to a dorm room?

Except… Matt closes the door behind him and frowns. Nate hasn’t been in the room in at least twelve hours, maybe a day, that much is clear by the lack of any scent markers or moved items. Nor has anyone else. But the chicken wasn’t here before Matt left, so… that’s weird.

Then again, he’s too hungry to care. Fuck it, he’ll buy Nate another one from the convenience store that takes the meal plan. By the time he’s full, all that’s left is the bones.

He tells himself he’ll throw the container away on his way to class Monday, but when he wakes up from a dead sleep, it’s not on his desk where he left it. It’s not in the room at all. And neither is Nate. Matt can hear him down in McKenna’s room, snoring like a buzz saw. Matt feels the window just to make sure—it’s cracked open about six inches, in deference to the late summer heat and broken air conditioning, but there’s no sign it’s been open wider in the last day, and anyway he’d _know_ if anyone had done so.

He would.

***

“So are you coming?” Rachel from Frontiers of Science asks, and he can tell from the slight strain trembling through the words that this isn’t the first time she’s asked the question. He forgot to tune into her voice, overwhelmed by the cloud of scent surrounding her—floral deodorant, body wash, lotion, body spray, makeup, shampoo, conditioner, other hair products he doesn’t know how to identify, laundry detergent, dryer sheets, socks she obviously pulled out of her laundry bag this morning, faint traces of other girls’ perfumed arms around her shoulders. New people are hard.

Matt remembers he’s supposed to answer and fumbles through a few syllables, trying to figure out where she’s asking him even though he can’t think of a reason he would want to come anywhere. She seems to realize he needs clarification and adds, “To my sorority’s party this Friday?”

“I—Maybe. I have to study.” Matt shrugs his backpack on and offers her a smile. From the uptick in her heart rate, it seems to be effective. “Thank you. For the invitation.”

“Sure.”

As soon as Matt walks away, two of her sisters swoop close and start whispering about his ass. He doesn’t bother to suppress his smirk.

Now that Nate’s spending most of his time out of their room, Matt’s able to study there much more comfortably. Still, the library’s a lot quieter than the dorm, so Matt heads there as soon as he’s done eating. When he remembers to check the time, it’s 2 a.m.

Nate’s asleep in his own bed by the time Matt makes it back, so he tries to keep it down, just taking off his shoes and glasses before he practically keels over into bed. He kicks off the blanket on his way down and is too tired to pick it up. The same guy who was fussing at his roommate the night of the chicken is at it again, voice so far away that it’s barely discernible words. “—heard of burning the midnight oil, buddy, but I’m pretty sure it burns _out_ by this late on a weeknight. It’s not even midterms, yet. What are you gonna do at finals, huh? I’m tempted just to turn your alarm off and let you actually get some sleep, except I know you’d panic if you missed your 8 a.m. class, so whatever. Oh and now you’re sleeping without a blanket. Of course. Because God forbid you be comfortable… wait. _Does_ God forbid that? I should’ve paid more attention in Catechism.”

Matt’s last thought as he passes out is how annoying it would be to have someone bothering him all the time like that. Annoying. Not nice at all.

He wakes up to his alarm beeping, with his blanket wrapped around him. He must’ve picked it up when he was half-awake and forgotten.

***

Just after midterms, Matt gets in a fight.

It’s not intentional. Just like it’s not intentional that he fell asleep at dinner and wakes up hours later when someone—a food service worker, he assumes, based on all the smells clinging to her skin—touches his elbow to wake him up.

“We’re about to close, honey.”

“Oh.” Matt scrambles gracelessly to his feet, fumbling around for his cane and backpack. Usually it’s mostly an act, but right now it’s all too real. “I’m. I’m so sorry.”

“You’re not hurting anything. I just figured that you wouldn’t want to spend the night here, that’s all.”

“No. You’re right. I should go.” As he’s about to step away, he realizes he never bussed his table. “Oh, I need to—”

“I’ve got it. Get home safe, okay?”

He bristles internally at the idea that he can’t even walk the few hundred feet back to the dorm without getting hurt. “Okay. Thank you.”

As it turns out, she was right to say what she did, because he hears the panicked scuffle of flailing feet, trying to get away, before he’s even halfway back. Shouts caught behind brutal fingers pressed to a mouth, the purposeful vocal silence and heavy breath of someone who has a plan and is committed to its execution, and—Matt swears under his breath—the cold press of metal to flesh. Just across Amsterdam Avenue. He strains his ears, listening for Public Safety, police, anyone at all who can help… but there’s no one. No one but Matt.

So, he runs, straight toward the sounds, ignoring Stick’s laughter echoing through his mind.

He’s wearing a knit cap so he pulls that down over his eyes and nose. It’ll have to be enough. Besides, it’s just one guy. Simple.

It _would_ be simple, except the attacker’s got a van running yards away from where Matt catches up to him. The woman he’s holding at knife point screams the second she’s freed and runs as fast as she can toward St. Luke’s, which is a good choice on her part. Matt’s too busy beating the shit out of the guy who hurt her to really give her props, though. The other man manages to kick him in the jaw just hard enough to scramble to the open door of his van. Matt rolls out of its path, the front fender clipping him on its way past.

He staggers to standing and almost yells as his weight comes to bear on a broken bone in his foot. Son of a _bitch._ He forgot how much that hurts.

 _Pussy,_ Stick scoffs. _Soft and out of practice. What was that bullshit?_

“Fuck off, old man,” Matt mutters, and begins to hobble back to his dorm room.

By the time he gets back to his room, he’s so mad about how much it hurts that the anger almost drowns out the pain itself.  Nate’s gone, so Matt allows himself the indulgence of slamming the door open till he remembers neighbors and catches it before it can swing shut again. The last thing he needs is someone coming to see what’s wrong.

Especially since he forgot to pull his hat back up above his eyes. He probably looks ridiculous. Matt tears it off and stuffs it into his jacket pocket, absently noting how his hair feels weird and thick against his scalp, which usually means he’s overdue for a cut. There’s no one who can confirm or deny it, though, so he puts that on the back burner as he takes off his jacket. The movement brings the scrapes on his knuckles to his attention. His calluses are gone, and now he’s paying the price. The nearest ice machine is in the dining hall. Cold water will have to do.

“Whoa, man, what the hell?” that same faraway guy is demanding of his roommate. His voice is unusually clear, probably due to how quiet it is on campus at the moment. “What’d you do, fall down a manhole?”

Matt’s lips quirk in a smile as he turns the cold water tap all the way on and closes the drain. “Something like that,” he answers for the obstreperous roommate. It’s weird how he can always hear the one guy but not whoever he’s talking to.

“Fine, be mysterious, but I can tell you’re hurting. Your face is all scraped up, too. And what’d you do to that leg, huh? Sprain your ankle?”

“Broke a bone in my foot diving out of the way of a van,” Matt supplies, half-laughing at his own ridiculousness. He ducks to submerge his face in the water pooling in the sink.

There’s a long pause, then, “What the actual _fuck,_ Murdock?”

Matt startles so violently that he smacks the back of his head on the faucet.

“Oh my _God,_ you are absolutely determined to concuss yourself, aren’t you. Don’t answer that. Hold on, I’ll go get some ice for that, too.”

“I. I. Holy—what—” Matt can’t seem to stop stammering, but it doesn’t matter, because the voice has vanished. With shaking hands, he turns the water off and feels the back of his head. No bleeding, just a minor bruise. Maybe he hit his head when he rolled onto the sidewalk, or the other guy hit him harder than he thought? But surely he’s not _that_ out of practice.

He’s so discombobulated that he forgets about his foot until he thoughtlessly puts his weight on it. Grunting at the pain, he limps to his bed and starts to unlace his shoe with careful fingers. Meditation. He just needs to meditate.

And a sudden patch of cold appears in mid-air, right in front of his face. Matt jerks backward, falls off the bed, and scrambles to his feet again. He smells—plastic, polymer crystals, ice. Nothing human. But _something_ is holding the cold pack in front of him.

“Okay, you’re starting to freak me out. Don’t get me wrong, this is a nice switch from the silent treatment you’ve been giving me since day one, but you’ve got to stop acting like you don’t know when I’m here. I know you can tell where things are. I’ve watched you throw your glasses across the room straight onto your desk. So take this and put it on your foot.”

The cold pack floats closer, but Matt makes no move to take it. His heart’s in his throat and it feels like every hair on his body is perpendicular to his skin. He swallows a couple of times, trying to get the sensation of cotton out of his mouth. “Who—who are you?”

A long pause. When the voice speaks again, it’s lost its usual edge and gone a little soft with worry. “Matt, how hard did you hit your head? Do you—dammit, I don’t even know how I’m supposed to check for a concussion. Tell me who the president is, or something.”

Matt strains his senses, but there’s nothing—

No. Wait.

His radar sense is actually picking something up. He’s just so used to relying on his other senses to look for people that he didn’t really process the information, especially with it overlapping the furniture in the room. There’s an _impression_ of a person, right here, standing not a foot away. Holding the cold pack out toward him still. Matt concentrates on the size. It’s just… a human, as far as he can tell.

Matt sits, takes the cold pack and presses it to his foot. He doesn’t know what else to do. The sharp twinge of pain shoves his brain back into gear. R.I.C.E. Rest, ice, compression, elevation. Right. He puts his pillow at the bottom of the bed and rests his foot on it, not taking his attention from the shape in front of him.

“That’s more like it.” The guy—ghost?—drifts closer. “You wanna tell me what’s going on? I mean, c’mon, I know you haven’t been overly eager to be friends, but even you have to know who your roommate is, right? Shit, that sounds like a blind joke, but I swear it’s not, it’s just a lot of times you _don’t_ seem to register the fact that I’m in the same room, and believe me, Foggy Nelson has never been accused of being easily overlooked until you.”

Matt shoots upright again. “F— _Foggy_?”

***

He doesn’t get a lot of sleep that night. Foggy’s got an entire list of grievances, from how Matt continuously ignores his efforts to be friendly (“I’m usually good at making friends with people, man, you are an _outlier_ ”), to letting his “friend, Nate or whatever” sleep in Foggy’s bed (“I don’t care how comfortable the Common Room couch looks, it feels like sleeping in an iron maiden”), to the fact that Matt seems hell-bent on killing himself through neglect (“it’s like trying to take care of a feral cat, do you even _eat_?”). And he’s determined to take advantage of Matt’s no longer “ignoring” him in order to get those grievances off his chest. Matt tries to break into the verbal flood a few times, but his hesitant efforts are warded off with “and _another_ thing!” all while Foggy bandages Matt’s cuts and scrapes with greater care than Matt would expect a spirit to evidence. God knows where the Band-Aids came from.

Foggy finally seems satisfied with his work, sitting back (how can he sit on the mattress, how can he _be here at all_ ) and saying, “There. My mom wanted me to be a butcher, you know, but I think I could’ve been a fairly decent paramedic. That’s some professional-grade work, if you ask me. Which you didn’t, because when do you ever _talk_ to me at all?”

“Foggy. Are you.” Matt twists his fingers anxiously, trying to figure out a way to say this politely, but there _is_ no way. “Are you dead? Is that why you didn’t show up on move-in day?”

Foggy laughs, but it fades away almost instantly. “That’s not very funny.”

“I’m not trying to be, to be _funny_ , it’s just—I haven’t been ignoring you, I really didn’t know you were here.” Matt takes a deep breath. “Because I don’t think anyone else can see you, and I can’t feel your body heat, or—” _hear your heart_ “—or any of the things that I usually do, with… people.”

“I was _here_ on move-in day, Matt. Don’t you remember me telling you I’d remembered who you were from when we were kids and you saved that old guy? I thought I’d offended you or something when you didn’t even respond.”

“You weren’t here.” Matt’s starting to wonder if he’s going crazy. “I swear, I never heard you.”

He’s so off-kilter that he doesn’t hear footsteps approaching until Nate’s key is in the door. Nate steps in, reeking of McKenna, then stops dead. “Whoa. You scared me, sitting in the dark like that. You all right?”

Like the dark matters to him anyway. Matt nods, then shakes his head. “You, um. You don’t see anybody else here, do you?”

Nate flips the light on and actually looks around the room, which is more than Matt expected him to do. “No. You must’ve had a bad dream.”

“What the hell, dude, I am _right here_ ,” Foggy retorts, indignant.

Matt speaks over him. “I guess I did. Thanks for checking.”

“No problem.” Nate turns the light back off and collapses into bed.

“Ugh.” Foggy lifts the cool pack off Matt’s foot. “You should probably give that a break. Don’t want frostbite, after all.”

Nate’s already well on his way to actual sleep, breathing and heart rate slowing down, so Matt chances a barely-there whisper. “Do you actually sleep on the Common Room couch?” How can a ghost _sleep_?

But the impression of Foggy moves slightly. A fidget. “Actually… I’ve kind of had a problem with insomnia lately. I can’t seem to shut my brain off. And believe me, having to lie down on those worn-out cushions without so much as a throw pillow isn’t exactly conducive to a restful night regardless.” Matt can’t really tell, of course, but he imagines Foggy glaring in Nate’s direction as he speaks.

He manages to pull a polite response from the depths of his continuing shock. “I’m sorry. That sucks.”

“Yeah, well…” Foggy sighs. “You need to get some rest.”

Yeah, right, like Matt’s ever going to sleep again. Ghosts are real. They’re _real_ and they’re Sixth-Sensing it all over the place, with no idea they’re dead, holy shit, what if he starts hearing them everywhere? What if he _already is_? What if half the people he hears are already dead? What if his dad— “No,” he says, cutting off the thought before it can fully form, but Foggy thinks it’s directed to him.

“Fine, do whatever you want, Murdock, I guess I should count myself lucky you’re acknowledging me at all.”

And then the impression of him just vanishes.

Matt lies down on his back, but his eyes stay wide open until the sun comes up.

***

He skips lunch the next day and instead goes to Mass, then proceeds to confuse the hell out of Father Dan with a host of questions about ghostly apparitions.

“I’m not aware of any sort of doctrinal practice about ghosts, or canon law,” the priest says. “I can check, of course. But, we’re Catholic, Matt. Believing in the supernatural is kind of the deal.”

“So, you can’t,” Matt swallows hard, because he knows he sounds nuts, but he doesn’t know what else to do, “you can’t think of any reason a person might experience… visitations. From a spirit.”

“Well… in this scenario, was the spirit summoned? Or did it simply appear?”

“It just appeared.” Sort of.

“I can think of two reasons, if we go with the assumption that this is an actual human spirit. One, they’ve been sent by God to convey a message, the way Samuel’s spirit was sent by God to rebuke Saul even though the medium tried to call him first. Two, they’re in Purgatory and still have unlearned lessons from their lives on earth that they need to complete.” Father Dan is silent for a long moment. “Are you sure this is actually a dead person?”

Matt knows he means “not a hallucination,” but his brain processes the question in another way. _Is_ Foggy dead? “I-I don’t know.” He adds after a second, “It’s all hypothetical, anyway. Not real, of course.”

Father Dan’s heartbeat puts the lie to his answer. “Of course.”

Instead of going back to his room, Matt heads to the library and starts going through obituaries. Before long, he’s checked the site of every newspaper he can think of, and each leads to the same dead end: no death of Franklin Nelson has been reported. Neither have any missing person reports been filed for him. So, three possibilities Matt comes up with off the top of his head: Foggy’s dead and his grief-stricken parents didn’t bother to pay for an obituary; Foggy’s not dead and Matt is just going crazy; or Foggy’s not dead but somehow he’s able to astral-project without realizing it.

The weather’s pretty good, so Matt heads to a bench outside near one of the garden display beds to think.

“How was class this morning?” Foggy asks, sounding closer than ever, and Matt barely manages to cover a full-body flinch.

“Fine!” he barks, too loudly. A couple of heads turn in his direction from passersby before they quickly look away again. Matt ducks his head and sort of murmurs into his shoulder. “Did you go to class?”

“Sure I did, though I don’t know why I bother if I’m never going to get an assignment for the big group project that’s due in a couple of weeks. I didn’t see you at lunch.”

“Yeah, I went—I went to Mass.”

Foggy laughs. It’s a nice laugh; it makes the corners of Matt’s mouth pull up involuntarily. “You make the Pope look like a pagan, Matt.”

Matt breaths out a laugh of his own. “My grandmother always used to say Murdock men have the devil in them. Call it a preventative measure.”

“Well, you’ve escaped his home in Hell’s Kitchen, so I guess that, combined with regular church attendance’ll keep him at bay.”

“Hell’s Kitchen” triggers a memory from the night before. “You said you remembered me, from the news, when we were kids.”

“Sure, yeah, from when you got your peepers knocked out saving that old dude.”

Matt snorts with laughter, too amused to care that people are looking at him again. “They didn’t get _knocked out._ ”

“Yeah, I’ve noticed. They’re very pretty.”

Foggy says it grudgingly, like it’s a concession, not a compliment, but Matt flounders a little anyway. His face is, in a lot of ways, a non-issue to him, and he wavers between using it to ease his way in difficult situations and forgetting about it until someone brings it up (usually behind his back). It’s odd to suddenly feel like maybe he _wants_ someone to like the way he looks, especially when he can’t even map Foggy’s appearance for himself.

Because Foggy _isn’t really here,_ oh God, he just blushed over a ghost—or hallucination—calling him pretty, what the _hell_ is the matter with him?

Foggy seems to take the silence as more awkward than Matt meant it to be. The resulting flood of words has the air of a retreat, anyway. “Speaking of pretty, wow, this day is _gorgeous_. All this sunshine isn’t very late fall at all but I’ll take it. Some of the flowers are even still blooming. Do you, uh, do you want me to describe it for you? Is that weird?”

Nobody’s spontaneously narrated for him in years. Matt swallows against a lump in his throat. “No. Not weird at all. Please.”

“Okay. So, right now there’s a little sparrow pecking around the bush directly behind us. I have no idea what he’s looking for but I think he just found a french fry, so, good job, sparrow.”

Matt leans, as subtly as he can, toward the sound of Foggy’s voice as he continues. It’s a good fifteen minutes of Foggy’s sharp and funny observations, with occasional interjections from Matt, before he realizes he feels more relaxed than he has since… well. Since he can remember, really.

***

For a couple of weeks, Matt alternates between feeling like he needs to check himself into a mental hospital and wanting to spend every available moment talking to Foggy. Because Foggy is really good at making Matt laugh, sure, but he’s also _smart,_ so smart that he can actually help Matt with his homework, and now that he’s getting over his grudge over Matt having apparently given him the cold shoulder for months, he’s got a way of teasing Matt out of taking himself too seriously without making Matt feel stupid about it.

Plus, Matt kind of likes being bothered to do things like eat, and sleep, and leave his room for reasons other than class sometimes, which is something else Foggy is good at. 

Matt keeps a Google Alert for Foggy’s name, just in case, but nothing ever comes up. He even goes to Hell’s Kitchen, one Saturday, and walks around, listening for someone to mention Foggy’s name, or his parents’, asks about the hardware store Foggy said his dad used to own, but it’s owned by a Vietnamese family now and they don’t speak enough English to really understand what he wants to know.

They’re sitting at a table in a coffee shop near campus a week later—well, Matt is sitting, Foggy is… existing—when Marci Stahl walks up to them. Matt recognizes her immediately from Philosophy. She has a way of debating Professor Beardman’s points that simultaneously signals her complete disdain for moral quandaries and her consummate ability to use them for her own purposes.

“So,” she says, and her voice is sharp with a note Matt can’t quite place, but it’s got a tremor underlying it, so faint it’s barely there. “I was going to ignore your little ghostly tête-á-têtes I keep observing around campus, but he’s got you laughing like an idiot in public now, and I have to wonder, Murdock, if this is a bit more serious than the average haunting.”

Ah. The note is pure fear.

Matt can’t help his start of surprise, but before he can ask, Marci says, “Yes, I can see him.”

“M-Marci,” he stammers, caught halfway between elation—she can see him! Matt’s not crazy and _Foggy is real_ —and worry.

Foggy, at least, seems pleased. “ _Finally_ , someone besides you decides to acknowledge my existence.”

Marci tilts her head in a way that usually signals utter disdain in class. “Oh my God, how can you be so incredibly obtuse. Even for someone without an actual brain that’s pretty impressive.” Leaning over, she sticks her hand right where Foggy’s sitting and waves it around. “Did you just not notice how you can _walk through walls_ now? You’re dead. Leave Murdock alone. He might specialize in wrecking the grade curve but I hardly think that warrants this sort of punishment.”

“It’s not a punishment,” Matt blurts, at the same time Foggy whispers, “Fuck me.”

“Sorry, you’ve missed your chance on that one.” Marci turns to Matt, and her tone slides straight into judgmental. “Are you telling me this is _voluntary?_ You know he’s here and, what, you just rolled with it? I can’t escape the dead bastards, but it’s beyond me why anyone would subject themselves to that sort of shadowing of their own free will.”

“I don’t think he’s dead,” Matt says, then catches himself and adds, “Bastards, plural. You see ghosts a lot?”

“Like I said, I can’t escape them.” She sits down in Foggy’s seat. He makes a startled noise of protest. “Catch up with reality, sweetie, you don’t have muscles that get fatigued if you stand.”

Matt can’t ping Foggy’s location anymore with her radar impression overlaying his, but Marci makes a satisfied sound before sipping her latte. “Good, he’s gone. You don’t think he’s dead? What else could he be?”

“I don’t know, but there haven’t been any obituaries for him, and he’s from Hell’s Kitchen like me. I would’ve been able to find something.”

Marci’s silent for a long moment. “Personally I was just thrilled that someone else has the same curse as me. I was hoping to find some misery-loving company to bitch about how moping spirits ruin the cityscape. Now you’re telling me you’ve done some actual detective work for this one? Why do you care?”

 _We were supposed to meet. We were supposed to be friends._ “He was supposed to be my roommate, but something happened, and he never showed up. Then, weeks later, he did, but… the way you saw.”

Marci drums her fingernails on the table, one quick tap-tap-tap-tap, before stilling again. “Have you tried calling hospitals?”

Matt sighs. “It’s… quite a bit of work, for me, and anyway they couldn’t tell me anything.”

“You wouldn’t ask _about_ him, Murdock. You’d ask for his room. If they say they don’t have a patient with that name, move on.” Marci swirls her cup around. Matt listens to the coffee form its own tiny cardboard-encompassed whirlpool, feels the heat fluctuate within the motion. “You wanted to know if I see a lot of ghosts. Do you not? I know you can’t actually see them of course, but… hear them?”

“Foggy’s the only one.” Matt swallows. “How many do you see? Right now.”

Marci hums speculatively. “Five.”

“And where—where are they?”

“One’s behind the counter. Two are talking at the table next to us. One’s across the street. I think she’s window shopping. The other one’s sitting on the roof.”

Matt listens, but he can’t hear the two at the table beside him. “Do they know? Know that they’re dead?”

“I’d imagine it’s hard to miss.” Matt does his best to stare her down, and after a moment she relents. “Yes. They know. Your personal poltergeist is definitely an exception to some rule or other. I just don’t know which one. It’s not like the second sight came with a guide book.”

***

Foggy finds Matt in his room a few hours later, listening to his screen reader go through the list of hospitals. There are… a lot of them. Matt’s concentrating so hard on listening that he doesn’t even notice Foggy until he says right next to Matt’s ear, “Dude, this is going to take forever.”

Matt nearly jumps out of his skin. “Foggy!”

“Yeah. Sorry for bailing earlier. Your friend’s terrifying. And hot. But also terrifying.”

“She’s not really a friend, more like a semester-long object lesson in mutually assured destruction,” Matt says absently, preoccupied with digging his phone out of his pocket and calculating how many minutes he has left.

“Matt.”

“Yeah?”

Foggy’s voice has gone small. “Do you think the reason nobody talks to me anymore is because I’m dead?”

Matt reaches for him automatically, but remembers in time to pull his hand back before it goes through him. “No. No, buddy, Marci said the ghosts she sees know they’re dead. You’d know.” He hesitates. “But you’re definitely not physically here. You realize that, right?”

Foggy makes a miserable sound of assent. Matt wants to hug him _so much._ Which is weird, because he’s not usually a very huggy person. But this is Foggy, and he’s hurting, and there’s nothing Matt can do about it.

Except maybe figure out why he’s here.

“It’s going to be okay.” It has to be. “Let’s just—let’s just call the hospitals and see what we find out, okay?”

Foggy takes a moment to answer, but he sounds better when he does. “Okay. You want me to read the numbers to you?”

Matt smiles, and ignores how warm his chest feels at the consideration. “Sure. That’d help.”

It takes over an hour, but Matt finally calls the right number. When he asks for “Franklin Nelson’s room,” the operator says, “One moment,” then, “I’ll connect you, sir.”

Matt sits in blank surprise until the line starts ringing again. Before he can decide what to do, a woman picks up the phone and says, “This is Anna.”

Well, what the hell. “Hello, I was—I was calling for Foggy?” On behalf of him, anyway.

“Ooh, did this one work?” Foggy asks.

The woman’s voice sharpens. “Who is this?”

“Matt. Matt Murdock.” He fumbles for an explanation while Foggy moves closer. “I was supposed to be Foggy’s roommate at Columbia this year, but he didn’t show. We’d spoken a lot,” a lie, but also not really, “so I was worried, and—someone mentioned he was here?”

“Oh...” The edge vanishes from her words. Matt can practically hear her shoulders slump. “Oh, honey.”

And then she begins to explain.

***

Once Matt hangs up, he and Foggy sit in silence for a few minutes.

Foggy breaks it with, “So. A car accident. On move-in day.”

Matt nods.

“And I’m in a coma.”

Matt nods again.

“And they’re going to disconnect me from life support next month.”

Matt’s heart lurches like it’s trying to leave his chest. “No,” he growls, fists clenching on his thighs. “No, they won’t.”

Foggy laughs, but it sounds like a sob. “I appreciate the sentiment, Matty, but you really don’t have a say in whether or not they pull the plug. From what I heard.”

“No,” Matt says again, like it’s a talisman, a verbal amulet against a future that absolutely, positively cannot happen. “I-I don’t care, Foggy, I’ll steal you from the hospital if I have to, you’re _not dead_ and I won’t let them kill you.”

That gets a genuine belly-laugh out of Foggy. “You’d steal me from the hospital? I can’t decide if that’s creepy or really, really romantic—” He cuts himself off, suddenly and completely.

Matt thinks he knows why, and he doesn’t want to let it get awkward again. “Why can’t it be both?” he asks, keeping his tone light. Fuck it. They probably don’t have time to dance around any topics, let alone this one.

When Foggy speaks, his voice is so close, it feels like he could be leaning on Matt’s shoulder. “No reason it can’t.”

***

Foggy’s mom—who’s technically his stepmom, but Foggy says she’s his mom for all intents and purposes—told Matt that she’s keeping everyone updated on Facebook, so Matt friends her immediately. And then he heads to the library to research as much as he can about comas and recovery.

“She said it wasn’t a persistent vegetative state,” he reminds Foggy, a week after the phone call.

“I remember, I was there too,” Foggy replies, sounding distracted. “Okay, clearly we’ve been at this too long because my eyes are starting to cross and technically I don’t even have eyes. You need to eat. C’mon.”

“In a minute.” Miracle of miracles, they actually had Braille versions of the books he needed, so Matt’s fingers are flying.

“You said ‘in a minute’ an hour ago.”

“I said in a few minutes, and sixty minutes isn’t actually that many.”

“Oh, good, then you must mean sixty seconds when you tell me ‘in a minute’ now. I’ll start the countdown.”

Matt ignores him until the last ten seconds, at which point Foggy starts counting down out loud, closer and closer with each number until at “three” Matt slams his hands over his ears.

“Whoa,” he hears through his fingers, then, “Hey, Matt, buddy, can you hear me? Sorry, didn’t mean to hurt you.”

Matt eases his hands down. “You didn’t—you didn’t hurt me, I’m fine.”

“Yeah, that explains the screwed-up face of agony you had just then. It screamed ‘I’m fine.’”

“I just have sensitive ears.”

“And sensitive skin, as witness the silk sheets, and sensitive taste buds—don’t think I didn’t notice the face you made when the barista sneaked the wrong coffee to top off your Americano so she didn’t have to brew more for yours.”

“You saw and you didn’t say anything?”

Foggy laughs. “I thought you wouldn’t notice!”

“It was disgusting,” Matt grumbles.

“I bet.”

Matt slides his hands back out of the way as the laptop screen begins to close. He hasn’t been able to figure out how Foggy can sometimes physically interact with their environment, but not with other humans. There have to be _rules_ to the whole thing, but they don’t matter so much as getting Foggy to wake up, and they’ve got so little time. “Foggy, no. I promise I’ll eat later.”

“Believe me, buddy, nobody appreciates your dedication to this particular cause more than me. But one of us has a body without a feeding tube, which means he has to physically put food into his mouth in order to keep going. Spoiler: it’s you. So c’mon. Sustenance.”

Reluctantly, Matt stands and begins to put his things into his bag. “I could just grab a snack from the coffee shop and come right back up.”

“Matt.”

Matt freezes. Foggy’s got a variety of voices, but most of them have an undercurrent of humor, even the serious ones. This particular voice… doesn’t. “Yeah?”

“Listen. Don’t get me wrong. I want to stay alive. Pretty much more than anything. But it’s kind of not looking likely at this point, and you’ve still got a life that seems like it’ll actually continue past next month. You need to be thinking about yourself, too. You’ve basically stopped studying anything but comas, you skipped class three times last week—”

“I can catch up,” Matt interrupts.

“I know you can, I’ve seen your grades over your shoulder when you checked them, remember? That’s not my point. My point is, you can’t be hurting yourself trying to help someone who’s beyond that, okay?”

“Don’t say that.” The words are coming out too angry but Matt can’t help it, it’s not _fair_ that the best person he’s ever met is leaving, he just wants to fight something but how do you fight death itself? “Don’t. I don’t accept it.”

“Realistically speaking we both know my chances of waking up go down every day. My chances of waking up without serious brain damage are even worse.”

“I don’t care about what’s realistic.” Matt’s fists are clenched and his breath’s harsh. “It’s not realistic for me to hear your spirit, either. We were supposed to meet, Foggy. We were supposed to—” _to be together_ “—to be friends. We still are or I wouldn’t know you were here now.”

“I’m gonna let you have that one, because you’re a lot more of an expert in what’s reasonable on the supernatural front than I am. I’m just saying… don’t kill yourself over a dead guy, Matt. If I’m not around to take care of you, I’d really like to think you’ll do it yourself sometimes. Because I saw the way you _weren’t_ doing it before.”

Matt slings his bag strap over his shoulder, movements jerky with suppressed fury. “I’m not making any promises. You’ll have to do it yourself.”

“Hey, hey.” Foggy might not be able to touch humans, but his voice works just as well as a hand on Matt’s shoulder. “Okay. I’m sorry I said that. Let’s go to the Thai place, okay? Maybe I can get you to laugh so hard you get a noodle up your nose again.”

The tension drains out of Matt’s body. He can’t help smiling. “That was really gross, Fog.”

“But so amusing.”

While Matt’s shoveling pad Thai down, Foggy asks, “So what’s your major? It’s weird I never found out.”

Matt swallows. “Philosophy. I want to be a lawyer, so.”

“Hey, no way! Me too! My mom wanted me to be a butcher, so I decided to rebel by doing something that would make lots of money, instead.”

“Aw, c’mon, is that all you care about?”

“Rebellion?”

“Money.”

“No! Absolutely not. Truth! Justice! Couple of bucks?”

Matt grins. “Yeah, all right, couple of bucks.”

“So who’s the patron saint of lawyers, Saint Matthew?”

“No, he’s for accountants. Well, accountants and, and security guards. There are actually two for lawyers. St. Ives and St. Sir Thomas More. I like St. Ives better, though. He used to do mostly pro bono work. Donated his own clothes to his clients, founded legal aid societies.”

“Inspirational, then.”

“Yeah, very.”

And then it’s back to the library. Back to trying to figure out how to save Foggy.

***

Matt does something that he knows is stupid even while he’s doing it. He goes to see Foggy that Sunday.

He hates hospitals. Hates the smells, the sounds of agony, the way the fluorescent bulbs hum like wasps in his ears. Hates the way they make him feel 9 years old again. But there’s something about knowing Foggy’s body is there that makes him want to check, just to be sure.

He stands in the little waiting area near the elevator, listening to Foggy’s room. He catches Anna’s voice first, on her phone. She’s about to go get some lunch. The nurses are all congregated at the station, discussing a problem patient. Foggy’s going to be alone for at least a couple of minutes.

Matt waits until a transport orderly swipes his ID to get into the ward, sneaks through the automatic door, and gets into Foggy’s room without anyone catching him, mostly closing the door behind him.

He isn’t sure exactly what he’s looking for. Whatever it is, he doesn’t find it. Instead, he focuses on an impression of what Foggy looks like. About an inch shorter than Matt, maybe? Hard to tell when he’s lying down. Broad chest. A little softness around his middle. He briefly considers touching Foggy’s face, but discards the notion just as quickly. It’s wrong to try that on Foggy when he can’t consent to it, and for whatever reason he hasn’t been around to ask today.

As if Matt would be able to find the right words to ask for that privilege, regardless.

He drifts closer to the bed. Antiseptic soap, bruises from lying in bed in one position for so long, contusions that are almost healed, perfume that’s probably Anna’s. Pheromones. Fear, anger, grief. Lots of tears. Faded beneath the others, cheap cologne and something that’s probably Foggy’s usual scent. Someone brought a blanket and pillow from home for him.

When Matt gets really near to someone, he can feel the electrical impulses in their brain, although he has no way of knowing what they mean. Foggy’s are still active. That’s comforting, at least. Matt zeroes in on the sound of his heart beating, slow and steady. That’s even more comforting. Still alive.

Anna’s on the elevator, coming back up, cursing under her breath as she loses signal while talking to yet another friend about Foggy’s condition.

Matt leans over the side of the hospital bed so that he’s closer to Foggy’s ear. “Foggy. I know this is stupid when I’ll probably see you as soon as I get back on campus, but… I really need you to wake up, buddy. Okay? Come back.”

And then he slips out and heads back to his dorm room, where he finds Foggy waiting for him. Matt expects questions about where he’s been, but instead Foggy greets him with, “Got you something.”

“How could you possibly get me something?” Matt asks, but he can’t stop himself from smiling.

“Let’s not think about that too hard, otherwise you might have some uncomfortable concerns about those Band-Aids you were sporting a few weeks ago. But hey! Look!” Something small and metallic hangs in the air in front of Matt’s face. “Or… feel, or something. Sorry.”

“It’s okay.” Matt takes it. A necklace with a nice thick chain. He feels the small circular pendant and laughs. “A—Foggy, did you steal a _saint medal_?”

“It is literally impossible for a mostly-dead person to steal.” Foggy starts talking faster at Matt’s frown. “Or at least literally unprosecutable. It’s St. Ives. I figured that if I wasn’t around to look after you that I needed to leave someone else to do the job for me, and he seems up for it, what with the caring for people who apparently couldn’t do it themselves and stuff. It’s blessed, and everything.”

Matt runs his fingers over the medal’s surface again, and again.

“Do you hate it?” Foggy’s voice is too quiet.

Shaking his head, Matt holds the necklace out. “Put it on me?” Foggy complies, and Matt tucks the medal under his shirt. “Thanks, buddy. I wish I could give you a legally purchased one too.”

“Yeah? Whose medal would you get for me?”

Matt’s about to make a joke about St. Jude and lost causes, but at the last second he changes his mind and decides to be serious. “St. Raphael.” Raising his finger to trace the medal through his shirt, he adds, “Patron saint of happy meetings. I think—I think you could say our meeting was miraculous.”

He can hear the smile in Foggy’s voice. “I do too. So where were you this afternoon? Not that I object to you taking a break from all the research.”

His first instinct is to lie, but what’s the point? “I went to go see you, actually.”

“You did? Wish I could.”

“Really? Why can’t you? Do you have boundaries you can’t cross, or something?”

“No, I can go anywhere. Except… I try to go _there_ , and it’s like, I blink and I’m back in your room again. No matter how many times I’ve tried to get to the hospital, I turn a corner or climb a set of stairs and I’m going to your room instead.” Matt doesn’t know what to think of that, but before he can come up with a response, Foggy keeps talking. “Anyway. Ready to hit the books again? Why don’t you study for your classes while I read the coma and ghost stuff? It’s not like I’ve got finals on the horizon.”

***

Three days later, Matt goes to class as usual, goes to the library with Foggy, comes back to his room around midnight, checks Facebook, and leaps to his feet like someone lit a fire under him.

“Whoa, what—” Foggy begins.

“They’re taking you off life support tomorrow,” Matt snaps, grabbing his wallet and checking to be sure he has his MetroCard where he left it.

“Dude, who are you talking to?” Nate asks.

Matt forgot he was in the room. “No one!”

He barely remembers to get his cane before he runs out the door, too fast too fast, but he really doesn’t give a fuck about maintaining his cover at the moment. Foggy yells at him as he tears across campus, then is right beside him, saying, “Matt! C’mon, buddy, listen to me.”

“I’m listening.” Matt crosses the street and ducks into an alley, doing the math. This time of day, there’s actually no way public transportation will be faster. He’s going to run.

He throws himself at the nearest fire escape and starts climbing.

“Oh my God,” Foggy breathes, from down on the ground, and then he’s on the roof. “I feel like the fact that you’re a secret Olympic-level parkour athlete should have been _mentioned_ at some point, Murdock, holy _shit_.”

“Never came up,” Matt grunts, leaping from one rooftop to the next.

Foggy meets him over there and paces him this time. “Matt, what’re you gonna do? Fight the doctors? Put my parents in a chokehold till they agree to wait?”

“I don’t know, but I’m going to do something.”

“I don’t want you to.”

That brings Matt to a screeching halt, right on the edge of a rooftop. “ _What_?”

“I don’t want you to do anything.” Foggy sounds completely calm and absolutely sure and it makes Matt feel like the roof’s disappeared beneath him, he’s in freefall and Foggy’s still talking in that unperturbed, measured voice. “Chances are, my brain is permanently damaged and I’ll die soon regardless. I’ve had a good life, better than a lot of other people’s. And at the end of it, I got to meet you. There are worse ways to go out, you know?”

“Foggy—Foggy—” Matt gulps for breath, air knocked out of him in a way physical exertion could never manage. “I don’t want you to die,” he finally says, and it sounds wrong, like he’s a kid whining about an early bedtime. The words are too simple for the fundamental _no_ that’s roaring in his chest.

“I know. Me neither. But I’m not going to have you killing yourself to try and fight the world for another week or two of me breathing in a hospital bed. There is something you can do for me, though. Maybe.”

Matt collapses into a seated position, hamstrung. “Anything.”

***

It turns out that Foggy’s right about his hunch. He can get to the right hospital if Matt shows him the way.

Anna’s standing outside, on the phone, talking to what sounds like Foggy’s dad. “Tell Candace she can come in the morning with you… No, there’s no sense in all three of us staying here.”

“I’m going to go talk to her,” Foggy says.

Matt waits in the shadows, focusing on the street sounds so he doesn’t unwittingly intrude on what should be a private moment.

Foggy sounds like he’s carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders when he returns. “Okay. Onward and upward, my friend.”

Foggy clings to the inside of Matt’s elbow as they exit the elevator. They’ve figured out that he can hang onto Matt’s clothes, though Matt still can’t feel Foggy’s hand and Foggy says it feels like he’s just holding a shirt, not a shirt that’s being worn by a person.

“We’re going to have to wait until someone goes in or out and sneak in after them,” Matt warns. “It’s restricted access.”

Foggy laughs. “I just nodded like you were gonna be able to see that. Okay. Sneaking into my own deathbed like a heist movie. Got it.”

Matt’s able to get in again with hardly any trouble. No one expects people to try to break into long-term care.

When he steps into the room, Foggy makes a sound like he’s been punched in the gut.

“I know it must be strange, to see yourself like that,” Matt says, as quietly as possible.

“No, it’s, uh… I _can’t_ see myself.”

“What?” Matt has a pretty good sense of Foggy’s body, still warm, heart still pounding slow and steady. The bedsore-type bruising is still there, but in more places. The nurses must be moving him regularly to prevent them getting worse. “You’re right there.”

“I know. I can see the equipment and everything, but—it’s like I can’t look at me? My eyes won’t turn in the right direction.”

Matt doesn’t understand, but then again he doesn’t really need to. “How about if I walk you there?”

“Worth a shot.”

Matt steps next to the bed and grasps the rail on the side. “Now?”

“No, I—can you please touch me?”

“You want me to?” Suppressing an inappropriate thrill of gratification, Matt surveys Foggy’s body. There’s hardly an inch without some sort of medical equipment attached. “Where?”

“Um… I don’t know. How’s my hand looking?”

Matt doesn’t bother to correct the _looking_ part. Close enough. “Like it’s got a bunch of burst veins from IVs that’ve been in too long.”

“My forehead, maybe?”

Matt reaches for it. There’s a bandage over most of it, but a half-inch between the cloth and where Foggy’s eyebrows should be is still exposed.

The instant his fingers brush the cool skin, Foggy’s heart stops.

“Foggy?” he asks.

No answer.

The monitor alarms are starting to squeal insistently. Down at the nurses’ station, one of them jumps to her feet and starts running toward Foggy’s room.

He gave Matt permission to touch, so Matt leans to kiss his forehead before he slides out of the room just before the nurse turns the corner into Foggy’s section of the hallway. His heart feels like it’s on fire, his whole chest engulfed in pain. His usual surety of foot deserts him and he has to lean on the wall as he stumbles toward the elevator. Foggy’s heart monitor keeps on shrieking.

He hits the down button. Anna’s already crying on the elevator car making its way up to where Matt waits, and she doesn’t even know what she’ll find when she gets here.

The monitor’s extended beep suddenly cuts off. The nurse must have decided there was no point since—

_Thump-thump._

_Thump-thump._

_Thump-thump._

Foggy’s heart’s beating again. And it’s speeding up.

Matt laughs in disbelieving joy, but he still has to go, and fast. He slips onto the elevator as Anna steps off and hits the lobby button.

Just before the doors slide shut, he hears a nurse run out of the ward doors and call, “Mrs. Nelson!”

***

Matt doesn’t really expect to see Foggy again. Memory, he knows from all the research they did, is purely a function of information storage in the brain. Since Foggy’s soul, or whatever, was separate from his brain while he was with Matt, it stands to reason that he won’t be able to remember any of their time together.

Of course, it also stands to reason that the entire episode was an extended, blessedly temporary hallucination on Matt’s part, but he refuses to believe that. He didn’t steal the St. Ives medal for himself, after all.

(He does find out where Foggy got it because Nate discovers the price tag on the floor later. Matt goes and pays for it so he can wear it with a free conscience.)

Winter passes. Spring arrives. A few people try to catch his attention, to become friends or maybe more, but Matt finds he just can’t focus on any of them, despite what he guesses might be their best efforts. It’s like he imprinted on Foggy and now nothing else will do.

He finishes his freshman year and registers for summer courses so he can keep his housing. Nate moves out and Matt gets a room to himself.

Marci Stahl’s taking summer courses too. She catches up with him after class one day and asks, “Seen any dead people lately?”

“Haven’t seen much of anything lately. You?”

“Oh… everywhere.” She readjusts the strap on her messenger bag. “The reason I’m asking is that I saw your dead guy.”

Matt stops so suddenly he practically trips over nothing. “My—my dead guy?”

“Except he isn’t dead.” She tilts her head in that predatory fashion of hers. He gets the feeling she’s stripping his facades and seeing right to his core. “Which is a bit of a shock. And by ‘saw him’ I mean I’m seeing him. Right now. Coming out of Kent as we speak, with what looks like his parents.”

Matt reels, clutching his cane with both hands against his chest. Foggy’s _here_ , he’s _alive_ —not that Matt doubted it, but it’s one thing to remember his heartbeat and another to have it within a couple hundred feet of him. He recognizes Anna’s voice first, asking, “Do you want to come with us to that little restaurant around the corner we saw?”

The voice that replies doesn’t sound like Foggy’s for a second. Being encased in bone and muscle changes the quality of its tenor. But the intonation is familiar as he replies, “Nah, I’m gonna walk around campus while you two do that. Refamiliarize myself with the place.”

“Murdock? Are you all right? Your face just went the same color as the sidewalk. It’s gross, if I’m being honest.” Marci steps a little closer.

“I’m fine,” Matt breathes.

“Sure, gray is a very healthy shade for your skin.”

“I’m just going to…” He taps his cane on the asphalt in front of him and starts away. He can’t bear the thought of Foggy walking right by him without so much as a flicker of recognition.

“Okay, bye!” Marci calls after him, sarcastic as ever, and he realizes he was just rude, but he can’t bring himself to care. He heads for the library, Foggy’s heartbeat loud in his ears.

Once he’s on the third floor, he feels more settled. Okay, so Foggy’s obviously going to be a student here after all. His recovery must have gone well. That’s good news.

Matt pulls his laptop out but ends up sitting immobile, trying to figure out what to do next.

He frowns when the heartbeat hits his awareness. He’s only heard it a couple of times, but—

Yeah, that’s Foggy. Matt kind of wants to give St. Raphael the finger, and then immediately stores the impulse up for his next confession.

Obviously he’s not going to be allowed to escape this, so he closes his laptop and just. Waits.

Foggy comes wandering up the stacks, straight toward Matt, humming to himself. His attention must be elsewhere, because he starts noticeably when his head turns in Matt’s direction. “Oh, sorry! I’m being really loud. Probably the opposite of what you were hoping for when you came to the library, right?”

Matt smiles, charmed. Foggy’s heartbeat kicks up a notch in response. “That’s all right. I’m not getting that much studying done at the moment, anyway.” He indicates the closed computer with a wave of his hand.

“I think voluntarily taking summer courses is the definition of overachieving, so you’re ahead of the game. I’m a little behind it, myself. I could probably learn from your example.” His hair’s longer, now. Matt’s pretty sure it was short when he saw him last, though it was hard to tell under all the bandages.

“I don’t—I don’t think anyone would consider me a role model.” This is cheating, but he goes ahead and asks anyway. “You’re behind the game? Are you a student here?”

Foggy makes a _sort of_ gesture with his hand, then says, “Oh shit, sorry, I just wobbled my hand back and forth because the answer is sort of. I was admitted awhile back but I—” He hesitates, and Matt can practically hear him debating with himself on how much detail a total stranger would want to hear. “I had some other things I needed to take care of, so I’m going to be starting here a year later than originally planned.”

“Well. I’m glad you’re here now.” _Too eager,_ Matt’s better impulse control chides him, but he ignores it. Force of habit. Also Foggy smells really good and Matt kind of wants to just sniff him all over. “I’m Matt Murdock.” He offers his hand.

Foggy straightens to attention. “No way, dude! I was supposed to be your roomie last year! I’m Foggy Nelson!” He shoots out his hand and takes Matt’s—

And freezes. His hand convulses around Matt’s as the air catches in his lungs, and catches, and catches. His heartbeat speeds up to panic levels.

Matt shoots to his feet. “Foggy? Are you okay?”

“I—I—”

Foggy’s grip has turned painful but Matt’s too scared to care. “What is it?”

“ _Matt._ ”

“Yeah? C’mon, buddy, talk to me.”

Foggy heaves a deep breath in, then out. “Oh my God. You complete _dick_.” He punches Matt once, on the shoulder, not to hurt but to make a point. “‘ _Are you a student here_?’ What the fuck, Murdock, you were really not gonna tell me?”

Matt’s jaw drops. “Tell you? Tell you what?”

In answer, Foggy reaches for Matt’s neck and runs his finger gently down the chain, until he can hook it and draw out the medal. “You’re still wearing it.”

Oh. _Oh._ Matt’s eyes sting because he can finally believe. His voice sounds gravelly in his own ears. “You’ve been gone a long time. I needed _someone_ to look after me, without you around.”

Foggy steps a little closer. His warmth radiates out and brushes the front of Matt’s body like a caress. “I guess me and Ives will just have to team up, then.”

All of Matt’s words flee in a rush before the surge of emotion that clogs his throat. The only thing he can do is nod, and let Foggy kiss him, because Foggy—as usual—knows exactly what he needs.


End file.
